by Sarah Faber
After the ambulance had taken him away and the girls were settled back in bed, her mother sat slumped at the kitchen table with a glass of straight gin—the only thing in the house to drink. Luiza registered for the first time that throughout everything that happened that evening, Dora’s hair had been in the curlers she always put in before bed, and she wore no make-up. She seemed small and expended. Would she ever look like that? Luiza wondered.
‘It’s good that you were here,’ Dora said, examining her own hands as she turned the glass in circles. ‘You spared the girls the worst of it. He fought so hard at the end. I couldn’t watch.’ She got up then, kissed Luiza quickly on the top of the head, and left the room.
It sounded almost like gratitude, what her mother had said, something Luiza had always thought she wanted. Some acknowledgement that she knew him best, better than his own wife. But in that moment, even those few, tepid words washed Luiza’s stomach with fresh regret. After all, this failure—was that how he would see it?—was partly her doing.
She took a drink from Dora’s glass, swallowing down the pressure of her own vast selfishness. She couldn’t forgive her mother for pushing him into this study, but Dora, at least, had believed in its value, that the risk was justified. Luiza was corrupt for never really having had faith in the study, for her own baseless complicity. She had dreamed of one day being free of him, his lassitude and delirium—the frenzy of their lives together. She had even let herself imagine a different kind of life. Now, an almost savage guilt cut through the gin. For having gone along with her mother’s plans—no, for having helped her! By agreeing to come on this trip, by conceding that he should be tested upon, by allowing him to be taken alone to a hospital somewhere, febrile and toxic.
The little room in her mind where she sat alone, writing her fine sentences, that other life—it was gone now. Awful, selfish girl. And the girls had seen things, terrible things. They’d seen their father carried out tied to a stretcher by four men and, twice now, pathetic and wrecked in a bathtub. So what if they had been too young to remember the first time? The scene was nearly identical and it presaged the same ending: someday, you will lose him.
If she were to leave home now, she would be giving her father up to her mother, to a wife who couldn’t contain the fullness of him. To rejection. Dora loved him, but only that middle strip, not the expanse of all his joys and burdens. And now he might feel compelled to seek a cure for their sakes, to atone for his brain’s metabolic failures. Him trying to unburden them, pursued by their disappointment, spread wide behind him. And Luiza? Maybe she was just like everyone else, and as she aged and hardened, she, too, would want the same bland, uncorrugated comforts. Maybe that nebulous future life, the ‘something more’ she had imagined for herself—and lost—was really something less, and her father knew it. He knew everything—he always had. He had seen her aligning herself with Dora before Luiza herself had, and he knew he was alone.
Could he ever trust her again?
Everything she wanted that night, she could never have again: to be a child again, to be washed clean. To be forgiven, and to forgive them.
MAGDA
In the days since the family returned from Carnival, Magda has watched the maids dismantle, pack, discard. All the best dishes, much of the art on the walls—they’ve all been repacked, and she senses a current of unease rippling through the house, across the increasingly bare walls. She walks through the house, enumerating in her head all the missing items she’s known since birth, and reaches into the empty spaces they occupied. With her finger, she traces the outline of the absent amethyst grapes, the crystal duck she once despised, and wonders how it can be that now there is nothing where once, and for so long, there was everything. But Magda decides that it cannot be, because if she squints her eyes she can still see all the things that were there before, still feel their textures. And it’s up to her to remember it all, because everyone else in her family is trying so hard to escape, to get away before they’ve even left, to pretend as though their lives here meant nothing.
Mama spent part of the afternoon drifting from room to room, moving the odd thing from one pile to another, before going out to the veranda, smoking and sipping a cocktail, staring at the gardens. Papa has been mostly shut away in his office, but he left the house early this morning and has been gone all day, and the maids cannot be enjoined to go outside or to the beach because they say there’s too much to do. Even Evie doesn’t want to play; these past few days, she’s been sullen and withdrawn, wanting to be left alone to read on the couch among the half-packed valuables like some endangered aristocrat. Today, Magda pulled out tattered cards, the old backgammon game—more things they’ll leave behind—but when she loomed over her sister to urge her to play, Evie squirmed off the couch and ran out the back door into the yard. When she came back a few minutes later, her clothes were dirty, her knees red and raw. It felt to Magda like a warning: even Evie could find ways to leave her behind.
And so now Magda sits beside Evie in the den, and when Odete stands in the doorway to tell them they should begin cleaning their rooms and sorting their things, the girls quickly become engrossed in old issues of The Brazilian American instead.
When the doorbell rings and no one answers, Magda flings her magazine toward the coffee table and gets up. She goes out the front door and down the walkway. Behind the gate: a family of beggars.
‘Pedindo esmolas,’ they say. Alms for the poor.
The man and the boy wear cut-off shorts, flip-flops, torn shirts, while the two little girls are barefoot and covered by loose cotton shifts, each with frizzy hair. A woman stands behind them all, looking down, a headscarf wrapped around her hair. But she has no bangles, no beads, no full skirts like the women who wore similar scarves at Carnival—just a man’s T-shirt and a thin, shapeless skirt that ends above her dry knees. They ask only for a few cruzeiros, or some food. Magda tells them to wait while she goes back inside the house and up to her parents’ bedroom.
When she returns, Evie is at the gate, asking the youngest girl, ‘Você tem alguns pintinhos?’
They stare at her blankly. ‘O que?’
‘Chicks. Do you have any more of those little pink chicks?’
‘It’s not her, moron,’ Magda says, swatting Evie aside. ‘And they don’t speak English.’
Magda begins handing over earrings, bracelets, a gold watch. Evie’s mouth is an O, contracting and releasing but emitting no sound. Finally, when Papa’s Rolex changes hands, she squeaks.
‘You can’t! I’ll get Mama!’
Magda grips her arm. ‘Don’t you dare. We don’t need all this stuff.’
But the family of beggars just stands there, equally shocked. They’re still staring at one another when Papa pulls up to the gate in the Silver Cloud. Evie covers her face with her hands, but Magda is defiant, her arms crossed in front of her, hip jutting forward. Her parents probably won’t even notice what’s missing, though some part of her hopes they will.
Papa gets out of the car to unlock the gate and looks at the beggars, with their hands outstretched, each holding something gold, jewel-speckled.
‘Eu gostaria de ficar com o relógio,’ he says, carefully lifting the Rolex out of the young boy’s dirty hands and winking at him as he slips it onto his own wrist. He pats Magda on the shoulder as he slides past her to get back into the Rolls-Royce and continues up to the house. ‘They can keep the rest.’
Magda’s shock soon bristles into outrage. He should let her give their things away. ‘We have too much,’ Luiza always said. Their parents are kind enough to the help, but it was Luiza who treated them like family, who took them gifts at Christmas. One Christmas, Maricota gave Evie a doll with a real dress that came off and Magda a soccer ball. When Luiza suggested they take their gifts to the maids that year, it was the first time Magda had seen where Maricota lived: the dirt floors, trodden so flat and smooth they were shiny. Every time she plays with that soccer ball, Magda wants to cry, thinking of h
ow much money Maricota must have spent on them, even though they already had so many things. But she doesn’t cry. She stops herself and thinks instead about how she’ll work hard and get a good job and make all kinds of money so she can buy the maids each a house in Canada with real, shiny floors and their own maids. They’ll never have to clean again.
The same night they took their gifts to Maricota, she led them down to the small bay near her family’s house, filled with brightly coloured boats and villagers who dressed all in white. It was New Year’s Eve and the crowd gathered filled little boats with flowers and candles, mirrors and lipstick, all offerings for Yemenjá, the mother of the seas. As the sun set, people’s faces and hands receded into the gloaming and all that white brightened against the dark, seemingly animate clothing pushing a hundred points of flame into the night. Now Magda wonders, who will teach her how a person should be in the world? When they leave Luiza and the maids behind, who will pull her back from steep edges, keep her from ripping apart everything she sees?
Even as she thinks this, Magda imagines all the trouble she’d get in for what she’s about to do. Back in the den, and watching her father’s back as he stands at the window, she reaches for the ivory chess set, lifts the lid, and grabs a handful of pieces, relieved to see the red queen in her hand as she shoves them under the couch.
Her abdomen softens when her father returns to sit down on the couch, leafing through a magazine without pausing long enough to read anything. But when he gets up quickly, the sudden movement of his large, lean body is startling.
‘To the garden, shall we, girls? Can’t sit around inside with our thumbs up our bums on such a beautiful afternoon.’ And he ushers them toward the veranda, where Mother is stretched out sleeping on a lounge chair. Seeing her, he hushes them theatrically and takes exaggerated mincing steps as though tiptoeing through high grass. ‘This way!’ he whispers, arcing his arm slowly in front of him.
Magda and Evie giggle quietly and burst into a run toward the garden, the same thought transmitted between them: Mother is the troll beneath the bridge! But Magda has to remind herself not to love him best of all when he’s like this. Soon, he’ll become someone else.
In the garden, Papa settles into his habit of fretting about the flowers. Though Georges does most of the work, Papa likes to poke around from time to time.
‘What do you think, girls?’ he asks, his voice booming and warm. ‘Is the bougainvillea going to take over the whole damned wall? And isn’t this hibiscus a bit vulgar, really? Something about the leaves, vaginal, and then that bloody great stamen poking out.’ He’ll tell Georges: cut back the bougainvillea and no more sexy hibiscus.
Magda and Evie tremble with suppressed laughter, still not wanting to draw too much attention to themselves, which they know instinctively is safest. Their father loves an audience and little clapping hands, but if they make demands he’ll get confused, overwhelmed. He’ll burn himself out faster.
‘Think of all the work they did, you two,’ he says, suddenly quite serious and looking them both in the eyes, a hand on each of their shoulders. ‘Your people, when they came from America. Think of the work, to clear the land, go into the jungle. That’s why I can’t bear to see an overgrown garden, or let those trees there encroach on the yard. Someone worked so hard once to make this land habitable. Fruitful. Did you know they grew cotton and watermelon? Sugarcane, potatoes, tobacco. They brought ploughs. Brazilian farmers had only ever had hoes. Your ancestors were iron-fisted oppressors, perhaps, but they sure could turn a crop.’
He pulls a few rangy canes back from the wall, and it occurs to Magda: what will happen to the garden when they leave?
She suddenly notices Mother at the edge of the garden, squinting and shielding her eyes from the sun, her silhouette appearing tiny in front of the eucalyptus hedge.
‘The girls should wash up,’ she calls. ‘It’s nearly time for supper.’ She gets up and goes back inside, not waiting for them to follow.
‘Hear that?’ says Papa, crouching down to Evie and Magda’s ear level, conspiratorial and whispering again. ‘Neah-lay time for supper? Even their accents remain. Mosquitoes trapped in amber. Remarkable monsters.’
He tells them it’s important they read everything they can so they don’t end up with a ‘myopic education.’ He says that the American Empire will fall just as the Roman did, which is when her mother would usually accuse him of being a communist if she were within earshot, and he would wink at Magda, the two of them actually iconoclasts. (Whenever Magda repeats the things Papa teaches them, Mama says she’s too young for such ideas—she finds Magda ‘unnerving.’) When Papa asks them now to name their favourite civilization, Magda chooses the Egyptians. Evie says the Babylonians, even though she can’t defend her choice, and admits she just likes the sound of the name because it makes her think of gardens and flowers and rushing water.
‘Hammurabi!’ Papa cries. ‘You’re the reason we had to go to war!’
And Magda shouts, ‘Bloody murder! Bloody murder!’ and then they dance around Evie until she’s about to cry.
Papa takes Evie’s hand and says he’s sorry but that she must learn: it won’t do to be feeble like him. The world will be bloody to her. And her sock wants darning. He grabs her toe, then twirls her by the wrist and makes her laugh.
This time it’s Odete who comes out, her face pleading. ‘Dona Dora says please come in. Dinner.’ English means it’s serious. Papa begins to lead them in. But at the threshold of the door, he stops, tells Evie to go in, that he has something he has to tell Magda. Evie pauses, looks at them both, then moves reluctantly, still glancing backwards over her shoulder. Papa slides the glass door closed and crouches down so that his face is level with Magda’s.
‘These past few days, I have walked and walked. I’ve been to every place I ever took your sister. I even walked into the sea. But she wasn’t there.’
This is how it happens sometimes: He stops being fun and free, and a heaviness settles over him. Her feelings get rearranged. Magda begins to feel hot and slightly panicky, and turns to see Odete still hovering, now on the other side of the door. They can both feel the acute energy straining at the seams of his sweat-stained shirt, his creased slacks. Magda entreats with her eyes, but Odete just smooths her apron nervously against her thighs and turns away.
‘And why would she be?’ her father continues. ‘Why would she stay in this crumbling, decadent place? She has set out, a dandelion seed on the ocean current. She is above the mountains now. Your sister is free. I can feel it.’
Until now, in spite of her determination to leave fairy tales behind, Magda has sometimes wondered if Luiza was taken by Yemenjá, the goddess of the sea. But she’s grateful for a different story, a new story in which Luiza is in the sky rather than the sea, because in water, things rot. She wishes Papa could tell Mama this story too, but it would only make her angry. Poor Mama, always struggling to keep everything under control, to keep everyone around her spinning in their proper orbit. Magda can feel her mother fading, can feel everyone slipping away from her. Evie, and the maids too—Magda’s losing them.
But he is here. When he wraps his arms around her, Magda goes rigid with disgust and leans away from him. But just like at the beach, her resistance quickly slackens, and she melts into his embrace. Papa takes her in his arms, a warm, yielding giant. Sparks come off him that don’t yet burn.
DORA
When Dora gets home from another morning at the beach, there is a rare silence, and all she wants is some sleep. To sleep and sleep and stop swimming after her dead daughter. She hasn’t slept well in months, but today she remembers Hugo’s discreet bottles with their different-coloured pills, and then she’s in the bathroom, tipping two white ones into her hand before she can think better of it. Luminal. These are the ones that Susan Harris whispered about one night at the casino. She said they would set her right up—no one could survive all that Dora has without a little help. She takes them when she feels anxious—do
esn’t Dora have a few good reasons to be anxious? A small glass of sherry to wash down the pills and she’ll sleep and sleep and sleep.
But even as Dora tries to lie still, she can’t stop getting up to go to the window, looking for her girls. She can’t quite remember where they’ve gone. Do they still exist when they’re not together? She sees a bird with grass in its beak hop mechanically along the picnic table and fly off. Magpie! And her little pots of flowers—impatiens, violets—they’re wilting from thirst. Laundry hangs on the line, shirts inflated by the breeze, bloodless bodies about to fly away. Luiza’s white dresses have all begun to yellow. She climbs back into bed, feeling herself slowing inside, and picks up the bottle of pills. Two more. Sleep more. Hugo is beginning to make more sense. A dream hooks her cheek and pulls her through the mattress, a tidal pool dragging dust motes, cities, planets behind her. Her spine softens, a stew of dandelion stalks, the fragmented wings of honeybees. Jars containing preserved organs suspended in an amber fluid. Luiza.
But then there’s shouting and when Dora opens her eyes, Maricota’s face is a pale brown moon above her own.
‘Acorda, Dona Dora!’
‘I’m awake, I’m awake.’
‘As meninas chegaram em casa. They shouldn’t see you like this.’
Of course—the yelling is from the television, which the girls always turn up too loud.
Maricota takes the bottle of pills from Dora’s hand. ‘Nã não, isso de novo não, elas precisam da Senhora. Not like Luiza. You can’t leave them too.’
It takes her a moment before she realizes what her maid is thinking—she’s always been overly dramatic. But Dora’s too tired and groggy to explain that this was not a suicide attempt, just a brief flirtation with escape.
‘Não se preocupe, querida. I’m fine. Just please go make me some coffee.’
‘A man is here to see you.’